The Age of Machinery: Engineering the Industrial Revolution, 1770-1850

摘要

This engaging, erudite study investigates the firms and people who made the machines of the Industrial Revolution, which Cookson defines classically, as the mechanization of British textiles 1770-1850. Trained in economic history, Dr. Cookson (who once collaborated with this reviewer) changes a conversation that focused on wages and coal prices, or on Enlightenment ideas, toward the motivations, education, and experiences of the early textile engineers. Along the way she dispenses with myths, including the anachronistic idea of "individualistic entrepreneurs," and any contribution of clockworks to textile machinery after 1800. Her machine-makers, "acting as any artisan would when faced with a changing world," nonetheless created a "new culture, beyond artisanship" in their works (pp. 125-26).